


Act One: Pistol Packin' Momma

by thesecondseal



Series: More Than Smoke: A Noir AU [2]
Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - 1940s, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Noir, Angst, F/M, Flirting, Fluff, Fluff and Smut, Friendship, Kirkwall (Dragon Age), Kissing, Mages (Dragon Age), Mages and Templars, POV Cullen Rutherford, Red Lyrium, Romance, Rough Kissing, Sexual Content, Smut, Templars (Dragon Age), Violence, noir
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-05
Updated: 2015-09-11
Packaged: 2018-04-19 04:44:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4733201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesecondseal/pseuds/thesecondseal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which we find ourselves in the dark, dangerous city of Kirkwall with people who shouldn’t be there. Snazzy suits, dramatic lighting, firearms, whisky, and too many secrets. Because armor’s nice, but perfectly tailored finely woven wool is better. *cough* Cullen Rutherford *cough*</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Act 1: At First Sight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prelude.

The first time Cullen saw her, Essa was putting the particularly stubborn head of Garrett Hawke through a hollow core door without so much as wrinkling the impeccable lines of her fine bespoke suit.

“Dammit,” she muttered, hauling Hawke’s face out of the splinter of wood veneer. “I’m sorry, Garrett. I thought it was solid.”

The big man laughed, reached back to pat her shoulder with an awkwardness that spoke to either drunkenness or head injury.

“Trying to give me nose to match yours?”

“Maybe.” She shrugged, brushed dust and wood from his face and wiped a smear of blood away from the corner of his eye. “But I wasn’t trying to blind you.”

She glared at the debris that hung from sagging hinges and shook her head.

“Put it on my tab,” Hawke growled affably. He sighed, the rumble deep in his chest and wistful. “Are you sure…?”

Essa’s eyes narrowed and his hands came up to defend his face. “I won’t hit you again if you use your words,” she sniped. “But the answer is still no.”

“You make a man forget himself,” Hawke said.

Essa folded her arms beneath her breasts and glared at him, all flint and steel and deep grey wool. The collar of her shirt was an icy blue. For a moment Cullen thought he saw sparks the same hue in her eyes.

“No one makes you do anything,” Essa retorted. “Make better choices or the next time, I call your sister to pick up whatever I leave breathing in the back.”

She jerked her head to faded exit sign. “Good night.”

“I’m going,” Hawke grumbled, sounding much smaller than he usually did. Cullen was still reeling at seeing the fighter cowed like a new recruit.

“This isn’t your home anyway,” Essa called after him, voice almost friendly.

“I know,” he snarled back. “You comin’ by  _the Hanged Man_  later?”

“I have Beth’s present,” she replied. “Though not breaking both your knees should be gift enough.”

“Can we leave that part out of your birthday wishes?”

She chuckled. “This makes us even, Hawke.”

He paused at the door. “We’ll never be even, Trevelyan.”

A look passed between them then, one that Cullen could not have defined even if there weren’t a dozen paces of shadows and dusty light between them in the narrow hall. The door slammed after Hawke and Essa turned, hands on her moving hips, scowl doubling its impressive display of disapproval.

“How long have you been standing there?” she demanded.

Cullen leaned against the wall, folded his arms in a mimic of her earlier bluster.

“Long enough,” he hedged.

Essa smirked. “Liar.”


	2. Act 1: The Tourney

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one that started them all (At First Sight is the prequel to this). Cullen, Essa, Cari, and Flissa in their modern (ish) au debut!

The bar was quiet, even for a week night. Not that the musicians seemed to notice. Cari sang every full-throated, smoky note as if the house were packed with high rollers and big tippers. Her dress slithered just this side of too tight, a long line from chin to floor. She might have been a class act in another town, but for the hip-high stripe of creamy skin that parted black silk as sharply as the silver stiletto strapped to her thigh. The knife hilt glittered with jewels, the threatening gleam passing for pearls on this side of the Kirkwall. Cari Trevelyan was a lady, no matter what anyone said. She dragged her family name around with pride or vengeance—Cullen still didn’t know which—but he knew sophistication when he saw it, and Cari was the real deal.

“You drinkin’ tonight?”

He heard two chunks of ice clink, smelled the whisky as it slid over rough edges, made its way somewhere close to cold at the bottom of the glass.

“If you’re pouring.”

Flissa didn’t water down her liquor, except for the brass and reds. Cullen slid a coin across the polished wood. The barkeep shook her head.

“On us,” she said quietly. “Shipment’s arriving tonight.”

Cullen nodded. “Number?”

Flissa moved his glass, drew a number in the condensation that gathered below it.  _Dock 6_.

“I’ll be there.”

“Bring help,” she told him.

It was a big haul then. Cullen lifted the glass to his lips, let the whisky slide like smoke down his throat.

“Midnight,” Flissa murmured as she walked down the bar.

“I’ll be there,” he repeated.

Beneath the strident wail of the saxophone, Cari sang as if her heart wept for the futile plight of love lost in the streets of Lowtown.

*

She walked into  _the Tourney_ as if she owned the place–and there were nights that Cullen thought she might–but when he asked around, she was only ever referred to as the muscle. It was all Essa had ever claimed. She worked security on the weekends; Cullen had watched her bounce guys twice his size and half as mean as if they were green beat cops still shaking behind their badges. Though even the brass didn’t worry  _the Tourney_  as much as the other establishments in Lowtown. There were whispers that Essa had put a couple of bodies in the river, just to make sure everyone was on the page she wanted them reading. There were others who thought that the right amount of money had fallen into the proper hands.

Cullen thought it a bit of both. He had watched Essa stare down the wrong side of a barrel more than once. The woman didn’t flinch; she wore a dare in her flat grey eyes that made a man wonder if a bullet would actually kill her. That dark stare lingered on him as she turned toward the bar. Long bare legs cut through the haze of a half dozen smokes—only some of which were legal—her scars shimmering pale against her skin. He thought too much about her skin. Wondered if she were that warm and tan everywhere. Her sister was fair, a delicate casting from a nearly identical mold.

“Not your usual night, Rutherford.” Her voice was as dark as velvet and not quite accusing.

He didn’t turn toward her, though he wanted to. A wide strap of navy silk hung off of her shoulder, and his fingers itched to drag it back up. Maybe all the way down. The shift she wore had cost more than a week of his pay, though it had been made to look like a sack and barely covered her ass. He knew—Maker, forgive him—that she wore nothing beneath it but a snub-nose Beretta and a trio of throwing spikes.

“Long week,” he said, lifting his glass.

“It’s Tuesday.”

Cullen offered her something that he hoped passed for a smile. “So it is.”

She didn’t accept his attempt at civility. They’d had a few run-ins before. Occasionally Cullen found himself part of an altercation that caught Essa’s attention. So far, he had managed to come out as the offended rather than the offender, but she was watching him. She was waiting for one misstep and she would have him banned from  _the Tourney_  for life. If the rumors were true, he would be lucky for his life to continue much beyond that.

Essa flicked her eyes down the bar toward Flissa, turned back to him with a glower. She stood too close, always using her body to keep him off balance, as if she knew that he dreamed of shoving her against a wall, hiking up that ridiculous excuse for a dress, and burying himself in her. She was always warm. Heat radiated from her skin as if she had flown too close to the sun and come back to earth gravid with power.

“Watch yourself, Rutherford.” She took a breath, breasts pressing against raw silk, chin lifted so that he could see the scar that ran just beneath her jaw. “Tuesdays aren’t good nights around here.”

She reached beneath the bar for her hat and coat, called a goodnight to the band and to Flissa. She shrugged into her coat giving him tantalizing glimpses as her dress shifted beneath the long trench. Essa shot him one last warning glare as she perched her hat on her head, a pin-striped trilby the same flat grey as her stare.

*                                                      

The docks were dark, empty, the night too quiet. Clouds crowded across the midnight sky, blotting out the moons and casting umber shadows in the small ripples of the quiet water. When the air was still, the stench of brine and decay lay heavy, suffocating.  Cullen was grateful for the restless breeze. A lone streetlight cast a feeble ring of golden light against the wall of a derelict warehouse. He stood just beyond its reach, body tucked behind a stack of shipping crates, while he scanned the docks for any sign of human life.

He could hear the tenacious scurrying of a pack of wharf rats as they scavenged a pile of refuse for their dinner. A few blocks over a dog barked, once, twice, then angry silence. But the docks were unnaturally still. The ships rode in their moorings as if dead, windows dark, great bodies not daring to so much as creak against rope or chain.

This kind of desolation only came from a liberal distribution of illegal funds. And a heavy dose of fear. Even this late there were usually sailors and dock workers, fishmongers and merchants moving goods or guarding ships; men and women looking to trade pleasure for coin to those for whom life spared too little of both. But tonight it was too quiet, and there wasn’t a ship at dock 6.

Where was the blighted shipment? And why was the lighthouse dark?

Cullen stared toward the mouth of the harbor, but could see nothing beyond the interminable press of the muted black convergence of sea and sky.

“Rutherford!” A painfully familiar voice hissed. “I am going to fucking kill you.”

There was a too brief flash of grey as Essa darted through the scant light, pushing him farther back into the shadows between the warehouse wall and the shipping crates. Cullen knew better than to speak, or to even attempt to slow her charge. When his heel hit the wall, he caught her elbows and spun, pressing her between him and a protest of weak siding. She glared up at him, eyes flashing a peculiar blue as she fought him into another rotation, slamming him against adjacent brick. Her grin was smug.

He wondered what that sort of arrogance would taste like on his lips.

“What are you doing here?” Her voice pitched just beneath a sudden fog horn, the abruptness of both sounds traveled through his body, a harsh contrast of lust and shock that sent his heart hammering. Cullen tried to look over her head toward the harbor to spot the incoming ship; the movement brought his body closer to hers. He heard her groan.

“I asked you a question.” Essa’s pulled her arms up between them, hands wandering to his neck. Her fingertips were rough with calluses. He waited for them to press hard against vulnerable nerves, but she stroked gently over his nape before tangling her fingers his hair. “Rutherford.” She tugged once. When he didn’t answer, she tugged hard enough to hurt.

“Maker’s breath, woman,” Cullen couldn’t quite concentrate beyond the warmth of her body, the faint scent of her perfume? Did she wear perfume? She didn’t strike him as the type, but there was definitely something faintly citrus teasing the shadows behind her ears. “What is wrong with you?”

“What is wrong with me?” The whisper became a mute screech of outrage. Cullen took advantage of her shock to reverse their position again. Her head clunked against the wall, but he refused to feel guilty. She had probably cracked the brick anyway.

“What are you doing here?” He returned her question to her, not so much because he expected an answer, but because it was the best way to let her know that he didn’t owe her one.

From the rather spectacular scowl on her upturned face, she got the message. Essa hooked one ankle behind his knee and pulled, hard. The motion knocked him off balance just long enough for her to wrest one elbow free. She had his wrist in another breath and shoved his arm behind his back hard enough to wrench his shoulder. He would cause them both pain if he tried to get away.

“By the Mabari,” she swore to herself as she began to pat him down with surprising detachment. “I have the worst luck with men.”

She was still caught between him and the wall, and every shift of her body was enough to keep Cullen trapped even without the hard band of her arm holding him against her.

“You’re not just the muscle are you?”

She ignored him, plucked his dagger from his belt and slipped it into the folds of her coat. For a moment, he considered struggling for it; he carried the weapon more for sentiment than protection. He leaned forward, let her fight more of his weight in retaliation for the insult.

Her face paled. Even in the lack of light, he could see how her freckles stood out, harsh across her crooked nose. Grey eyes blew wide; Cullen watched them flash as she rallied.

“Is that a gun in your pocket, Rutherford? Or are you just happy to see me.”

He flushed instantly, could only hope she couldn’t see his face as well as he saw hers. She wriggled against him, a brazen taunt, and that hope was dashed.

“Both,” Cullen muttered between his teeth.

The admission seemed to catch her off guard.  She whispered a curse he couldn’t hear, her grip easing on his arm as she lifted up on her toes until there was no longer even a memory of space between them.

“If you’re going to kiss me,” she threatened. “You had best do it now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tell me what you think! This is definitely new territory for me! :D


	3. Act 1: Midnight's Luck

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> First Kiss!

 

 

Essa glared up at him, lips parted, breath waiting for his response to her frustrated daring. If he didn’t kiss her—now—she was going to do something foolish. She had already given him all the permission he needed. Even his blighted Fereldan manners should have been appeased. A decade in Kirkwall and they hadn’t left him. She couldn’t afford to like that about him, but she did.

“What?”

He blinked down at her, tawny eyes a haze of lust and confusion. She couldn’t decide if she was relieved or disappointed that he hadn’t taken her offer to kiss her senseless against the dusty brick of a derelict warehouse. They had moments before they were interrupted, moments she should have been spending trying to figure out what in Thedas she was going to do with the impossible man. Instead, she was having a very difficult time recalling why she shouldn’t wrap her legs around Cullen’s waist and see how many layers of fabric that maneuver left between them. Not many.

By the Mabari, she was going to have to start wearing clothes that didn’t provide such easy access for her fantasies.

Essa huffed out a breath, infuriated with both of them. “Uuugh!” the disgruntled syllable stretched and she squirmed, releasing her hold on him and shoving ineffectively at the taut cage of his body.

Cullen almost immediately let her go. His hands slapped hard to the brick on either side of her head, but he said nothing. Not even to reissue one of the questions to which they both needed an answer. Essa stared at the bright buttons that marched two abreast down the front of his great coat, refusing to flounder in his stare as he flexed, muscles tensing, to put a breath of space between them. She lifted one shoulder, ducked her head beneath his arm, and pushed off, determined to put her lapse of judgment—and that infuriating man—behind her.

“Wait.”

Before she could offer a pithy retort, his hands cupped her face, fingers a gentle sweep past her jaw. They threaded into her hair, scattering pins and casting her hat to the ground as Cullen tugged her less gently around to face him. Essa stared up at him in surprise.

“You probably won’t give me another chance,” he murmured; she would always wonder if the explanation was meant for her or him.

Cullen’s eyes were hard and held no answers. They glinted, hard like citrines in the flickering excuse for a street light. The scar on his lip hitched up just enough to hint at the rueful smile he denied her. Essa didn’t know which was more dangerous, a man with a hunter’s eyes, or a supplicant’s touch.

“I wouldn’t have pegged you as a risk-taker,” she whispered.

“Liar.”

He urged her against now familiar brick, the hard press at her back a terrifying contrast to the first soft brush of his lips over hers. Her heart stumbled in her chest, breath catching at the taunt, and she pushed forward, greedy and spooked. Who was he to kiss her so carefully, as if she were a precious, tender creature? She had no place for either in her life. Not now, and especially not from him.

Essa caught at Cullen’s lapels, fingers tunneling between the fine flannel of his suit jacket and the heavier wool of his coat as she dragged him hard against her body. She’d always had a weakness for a good suit, a nicer coat. She tried to blame her lust on how Cullen wore shades of navy with an elegance that didn’t belong on a common runner, but the lie felt wrong between them. Even tangled with all the others. He didn’t fit  _the Tourney_ , didn’t fit the world that spilled out of the bar’s back office and ate at the underbelly of every city in the Marches.

But Andraste preserve her, he knew what he was about with that kiss. Even so delicate and sweet, she was nearly undone from the quiet questing of his mouth over hers. It wouldn’t do, she thought, as she arched against him, opened her lips over his in an attempt to change the momentum of the kiss into something she could pretend to understand. He sighed into her mouth, shifted to catch her bottom lip between his teeth. The gentle pressure scattered her thoughts, slowed her desperate charge. When his tongue slid against the corner of her mouth—a question as bold as any she might demand—Essa pushed him away breathlessly.

Cullen took a step back, eyes roaming her face with a concern she was not accustomed to receiving. “I’m sorry—I…” but the words died before she could throw an accusation of falsehood at him.

Essa stood, gaze flicking wildly in any direction but his, pulse twitching beneath her skin like a pony pulled up before the end of a race. No more betting on herself, she thought. She really did have terrible luck with men.

 


	4. Act 1: Out of the Fog

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Plot! (cause you know...I do that, lol)

It was the sound of footsteps echoing through the gathering fog that jarred Essa to her senses.  Expensive leather soles and the unhurried gate of men for whom time was money. Worren Merdrat had an abundance of both, and the dwarf liked to keep his lackeys waiting in what he thought was some sort of power play. Really it was just bad manners, and made Essa want to punch him back to Darktown, expect no one deserved Darktown, not even Merdrat.

“Hey boss,” the nasal whine of Merdrat’s accountant Nehren drifted ahead of the pack. Essa cringed. The elf might not have been a bad sort had he not had to survive for so long by letting humans think them his betters, but well into his forties, he wore false deference with an oily smile. It made her hate him and the entire system that made him what he was. “I thought you had a new guy coming in.”

Their steps were drawing closer. Someone—Sinclair probably, with that umbrella he was so fond of—rapped on the wall of shipping crates beside Essa’s head.  Cullen glanced to her sharply and Essa jerked her chin toward the lone patch of light in the shipyard. He might not have realized how they were courting trouble, but he seemed to know that no good would come from the two of them slinking out of the shadows together.

“Rutherford,” Sinclair’s bass answered Nehren’s with a rumble. “Flissa sent him. Former templar.”

Essa watched a nerve tick along Cullen’s jaw, but she hadn’t the time to think too much on the casual revelation. The steps were getting louder. She counted four footfalls–Merdret, Nehren, and Sinclair, the three were a regular model UN of the Free Marches underground–but the third stride, Essa couldn’t place. It was lighter, more certain. If she hadn’t known better she would have pegged the tread as Dalish. Not that it mattered, of the three she knew, none would be foolish to overlook the too familiar position she and Cullen were in.

“Play along,” she hissed. But she hadn’t time to wait for his acquiescence.

Essa spun back into Cullen’s arms, pushing him closer toward the warehouse’s meager floodlight. She had her back to the wood siding, his wrist in her hand, before he looked as if he had quite caught up to her improvisation. Essa wrapped his fingers around the hilt of the dagger she’d nabbed from him earlier. To his credit, he didn’t try to drop the knife as she placed the blade at her own throat and scowled up at him.

“Merdrat,” she called just as the dwarf and his escort stepped beyond line of crates. “You wanna call off your new boy, or do you want me to hand him back to you in pieces?”

She could only pray that Cullen played along with the subterfuge. She hadn’t a reason in all of Thedas to trust him. Essa dared a glance up at his face, saw to her relief that he wore his usual expression of cold passivity.

“Wasn’t told she’d be here,” he said with an easy shrug that didn’t take the dagger’s edge from her skin. If anything he adjusted the point beneath her chin to better effect.  “Which one of you is the boss?”

Essa’s glare turned genuine. Merdrat laughed, the sound loud and booming out toward the water and the small cargo ship that was doing its level best to sneak into the abandoned harbor. The fog had grown thicker while she was distracted.

Essa doubted it was a natural occurrence.

“Let her go before she kills you,” Merdrat replied, still chuckling. “You’re Rutherford?”

Cullen drew back and Essa brushed past him, nose lifted as she crossed into the dusty light to stand by her boss. “Watch him,” she warned, back to Cullen as she straightened her hair. “Or I will.”

She heard the flare of a match and turned, watched as Sinclair leaned with studied casualness against the heavy wall of crates she had just abandoned. The end of his cigarette flared, bright orange against the grey-black press of the night. The rogue sighed.

“I’ll watch him,” he volunteered, lips pulling tight around the butt of his smoke. “We lose too many runners when you watch them, Trevelyan.”

Essa didn’t comment, but Merdrat and Nehren laughed, the discordant harmony setting her further on edge. She offered Sinclair what she hoped was a smile. Most days she almost liked the man. He was just someone else’s lackey. Too thankful to be higher on the food chain. He had been begging for scraps in Darktown when Merdret found him as a boy. Or so he claimed. Essa didn’t know if was true, but he made Merdrat pay her well to run security for his bars. Kept her sister safe and working in one of the better ones. Truth was she owed him, and Essa didn’t like owing people. It was a habit she had made lately. One that was probably going to get her killed.

Essa made a subtle show of adjusting her coat, glanced again toward the harbor and its extinguished lighthouse. She missed the flash. It was too damn dark, and death waited out on the shoals. Merdrat’s ship eased in like a ghost and she shuddered. This was way above her pay grade.

“Your hat, Miss Trevelyan.”

Cullen’s breath stirred her hair as he joined them. She took the trilby without comment, brushing off the felt before returning it to her head. She watched Cullen hold his hand out to Merdrat, saw the appraisal and then the approval in the dwarf’s small eyes as he shook Cullen’s hand and began introducing him around. Merdrat might not have any manners of his own, but he equated etiquette with money, and anyone not lowborn usually yielded—willing or no—connections that he could use.

“Flissa speaks highly of you,” Nehren said, offering Cullen his hand.

“I hope that’s to my advantage.”

Essa didn’t wait to listen the rest. She stalked toward the docks, having seen enough of Merdrat’s fourth companion to know that she was woefully uninformed of some of her employer’s latest ventures. The fourth member of Merdrat’s company was indeed Dalish, and a mage. Essa could smell lyrium, thick and sickly sweet, just above the salt and offal of the bay. The woman wore a long gown of green silk-velvet, a pair of pumps that barely kept her hem off the dirty pavement, and no coat. Essa wasn’t used to seeing an elf at ease in such finery, at least not one who wasn’t kept as a highbrow pet. Made her wonder who held the apostate’s leash and which of them was the more dangerous.

“This is Elothra,” she heard Merdrat’s introduction just as the ship parted the fog, bumped Dock 6 with unnatural quietude. “She’s a new consultant.”

Consultant for what? But Cullen wasn’t in a position to ask the question. He murmured something polite that was met with a soft lilt soon lost by gentle noise from the water; Essa would have to wait for answers.

“What are you doing here anyway?” Merdrat bumped her elbow, a frown marring his ruddy face.

Essa shrugged. “You should have told me you were hiring him,” she countered. “I wouldn’t have followed him from  _the Tourney._ Didn’t quite look like he belonged.”

Her instincts had saved them trouble more than once. Merdrat nodded, seemed satisfied enough with her answer. “You can go home now. I have Sinclair.”

Essa glanced toward Sinclair, waited for his nod. Merdrat may have written her checks, but Sinclair was the boss on matters of security and they all knew it.

“Gladly,” she said. “Remember, tomorrow’s my day off.”

Merdrat nodded absently, his attention focused back docks. The ship rode, silent and unmoored, waiting for some sign that hadn’t yet come from the shore. Essa shot Cullen a glance he couldn’t return as turned her back on the bay and headed out. As she passed, he fell in beside Sinclair, lit a cigarette, made easy small talk with Merdrat’s right and left hands.

She really had terrible taste in men.

“I thought you were bringing help,” Fehren’s query gave Essa pause.

“Truck’s around the block,” Cullen answered. “I’m strong enough for the job.”

She shook her head. The man had no idea what he was getting into. Essa straightened her belt, surreptitiously accounted for her weapons. She called a perfunctory “goodnight” over her shoulder that only Sinclair and Cullen returned. She quickened her steps, too ready to have the gloomy harbor and the entire blighted night behind her.

“Legs for days,” she heard Sinclair’s appreciative murmur just before the fog rolled in between them. “Too bad about her mouth.”

“What’s wrong with her mouth?” Cullen asked, and she silently dared him to defend her.

“Poison,” Sinclair replied with sigh. “You make a try for that one and we’ll be chiseling ‘you’re an idiot’ on your tombstone.”


	5. Act 1: Loyalties

A milk truck.  The blighted templar had brought a milk truck to pick up Merdrat’s shipment.  _Town and Country Dairy._ Essa stared at the fading paint, once bright white and cheerful on a field of battle grey. Lowtown hadn’t seen a regular milk delivery in years, and the ration lines only had milk twice a week on the best of months. Unless Rutherford was driving through Hightown, he was going to attract too much of the wrong attention. It was the only truck for blocks, though, so it had to be his. What was the man doing? Whatever he had done to get Merdrat’s attention in the first place, clearly this wasn’t his line of work. It had to be the recommendation from Flissa.

Essa leaned against the side of the truck, legs and arms crossed, eyes dancing furtively along the too quiet street as she waited—for what she didn’t know. Cullen seemed more competent than Flissa’s usual type, but then Flissa’s esteem wasn’t nearly difficult to garner and Cullen was both pretty enough and quiet enough to have done so. Essa knew that he had broken up a couple of fights at  _the Tourney_  when Essa was working security elsewhere, and if anyone had an unadmitted damsel complex it was Flissa.

Essa checked her watch. Half past midnight and the entire harbor district was still as silent as a grave. The ship had docked by now. Cullen would be coming for his truck if he hadn’t done anything foolish. She and Sinclair were going to have to have a serious talk with Merdrat about not indulging the Flissa. It had been three years and he hadn’t won the woman’s affection. Essa was getting tired of cleaning up the mess her failed runners made.

“Are you checking up on me?” The question traveled unimpeded up the empty street. Essa scowled.

“Maybe,” she replied more quietly. “Merdrat didn’t send you packing?”

He moved easily through shadows, steps soundless on the pavement, long strides closing the distance between them more quickly than she expected. He tipped his hat, just enough that Essa almost missed the smirk that tugged at his lips as he joined her by the truck.

“You don’t trust me much, do you?”

“Should I?” Essa asked. She almost smiled. “That’s rhetorical.”

She didn’t know a good enough reason for Cullen to have climbed so quickly into Merdrat’s inner circle. They either had something over Cullen or he was the means to an end they wanted. Neither boded well for him.

Or her, if she didn’t start behaving with some modicum of sense.

There was a single street light at the top of Dock Street’s long, slow incline. The flickering circle of light illuminated the lonely corner, a corner she should have already turned. She should be halfway to the train station now. Essa kicked her heel back against the truck tire. If she were being honest, she wasn’t sure what she was doing or why. She had been working security for Merdrat for three years and still had only an incomplete list and suspicions about the entirety of what the man dealt in. She knew the usuals, of course: weapons, lyrium, black market goods, the occasional apostate looking to make a new life. The latter was one of Merdrat’s few business endeavors that Essa mostly didn’t mind, though she wasn’t foolish enough to think Merdrat an altruist. There was good money to be had in helping mages escape the reds.  

But tonight was something different. Something more ominous than butter and guns and frightened apostates. For the two years, there had been regular midnight shipments into harbor that was suddenly and eerily abandoned. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the silent watches were portents, that something terrible was coming to a city that saw the horrible so regularly no one noticed anymore.

“Essa—“ Cullen began. She raised her brows at him in reproof and he corrected himself swiftly. “Miss Trevelyan.”

She gave him a small nod, as if propriety were all that lay between them and they hadn’t been desperately plastered to one another’s bodies twenty minutes before.

“You’re going to want to get those letters off,” she said nodding toward the faded logos on the truck.

“The lettering is fine,” he assured her, a calculating look in his amber eyes. “You—“

But before he could finish his sentence the night exploded in thunder and fire.

*

Essa was swearing. Beyond the ringing in his ears it was difficult for Cullen to hear the extent of what was surely an impressive string of obscenities, but he knew the tone.  Fire and wood rained down around them, fragments of destruction that crashed to the pavement in a din of sparks. The night choked on smoke and ash. Cullen caught Essa by the shoulders, dragged her down between him and the side of the truck.

“Get in!”

She glared at him, though whether at the order or his instinctive shielding of her, Cullen didn’t know. The world was burning around them and she still managed to look angry with him.

“We can’t take this thing far!” she argued, slapping one hand against the logo on the door.

Cullen would have laughed if he weren’t so busy trying to get his bearings.

“Far enough!” he retorted. He could barely hear himself through the roaring in his head. That Essa didn’t flinch from the point blank shout made him think she wasn’t any better off.

“Get in the truck!” He yelled again. Or thought he yelled at any rate. Essa shoved at him. Her hat was gone and there was blood on her face, a smear of crimson that looked more like war paint than a wound. He watched her fumble under the edge of the truck and thought she might be in shock until her hand emerged clutching her trilby.

Not shock, he thought. Madness. The woman clearly needed to sort out her priorities.

He waited impatiently as she fought with the door, stumbling back against him when she wrenched it open. Cullen caught her waist in his hands, ignored her protests as he tossed her up into the cab, and climbed in after her. He had the truck started and moving before he closed the door behind him.

“Drive, Rutherford,” Essa’s voice held a note of urgency, her hands shaking slightly with every impact against the roof of the cab. “Brass and reds and the fire brigade will be crawling on this place in minutes. Not that we have that long, I know what’s in the warehouse beside us.”

She cast a discomfited glance out the passenger window, watching as fire chewed through the crumbling roof. Cullen didn’t ask for an explanation. He slammed his foot down on the gas pedal and peeled toward Depot Street at a speed that was only marginally safer than the inferno steadily engulfing the warehouse blocks around them.

“It’s the whole damn bay,” Essa murmured, staring in shocked horror at the rear view mirror as they sped away. Cullen stole a glance behind them and saw a thick cloud of impossibly dark smoke rising above the growing conflagration.

“What about the others?” he asked. “Should we go back?”

She shook her head. “Protocols.” Her voice was almost back to normal, smooth on the edges, a bite in between. “We go to ground.”

He didn’t really know what that meant, but Cullen kept his own council. He thrust his handkerchief out into the space between them.

“You surrender?” Essa asked in surprise. “And so quickly too.”

“For your face,” he snapped, more sharply than he intended.

“A little dirt bother you?”

“No.” He took a breath, smoothed the ragged temper from his voice.“But blood on your face is bound to attract attention.”

Essa reached up to touch her cheek, pulled her hand away, and held her glove up to the window to catch passing light.  “Thank you.” The words were grudging as she took the linen from his hand and wiped it over her cheek.

Cullen kept his eyes on the road, daring only small glances at her face as they passed into a better lit area of town. “Where am I going?”

She frowned. “Can this truck be traced back to you?”

“Do I look like an idiot?”

Essa snorted. He found himself grateful when she didn’t answer further.

“No,” Cullen continued. “It’s clean.”

“Take the next left then.” She was still watching the road behind them. “After that a right. We’ll have to ditch it.”

He followed her instructions, turning onto a dark side street just as a chorus of howling sirens split the night. She tensed beside him, muscles shifting as the fire brigade and trio of cruisers roared past them toward the burning bay.

“There they go.” She shrugged some of the tightness from her shoulders. “There’ll be no peace in Kirkwall now.”

“There was peace?”

He shouldn’t have asked. Essa rolled her eyes and continued scrubbing at her face with his handkerchief.

“A right here,” she repeated. “Park where you can. Junkers will take it once it sits long enough.” She tipped her head away from him so that what light there was washed over her cheek. “Better?”

Cullen nodded absently as he pulled the truck onto the side of the street just beyond the mouth of a small unmarked alley. She had led them to the back edge of one of the commercial districts, a small cluster of restaurants and vendors who survived largely on foot traffic from the train station.  The streets were mostly dark at this time of night, only a few lights gleamed in apartments above the struggling shops. He had no doubt the truck would be gone by the end of the week.

“Are you alright?” Her query called him back from thoughts that should not have been drifting.

“I’m fine.” He tried for a smile, but the expression was wasted. Essa glowered into the partially occluded mirror, handkerchief smearing more than it removed. “If you will allow me.”

She watched him warily,gaze flinty with suspicion as she returned his handkerchief to him.. Cullen adjusted the square of fabric to find a spot less soiled than the rest before lifting the linen toward her face. He paused, hand poised a few scant inches from her, to wait for her permission. Essa jerked her chin in a short nod.

“Fine,” she muttered tersely. “But don’t take time we don’t have.”

Her eyes slipped shut and Cullen stared through the low light at the curve of her cheek. There was no small amount of soot mixed with her blood. He rubbed carefully at a spot near her jaw, looking for the wound.

“It doesn’t hurt,” she whispered roughly. “You can scrub harder than that.”

She smelled of cinders and citrus, something sweet and hinting at floral or sunshine, neither of which were in abundance in Kirkwall. When he didn’t immediately increase his efforts, her eyes flashed open, wider and more uncertain than they had been when the warehouses exploded around them. Cullen nearly smiled. Nearly kissed the surly curve of her mouth just to watch her eyes fall closed again.  

“What’s next?” he asked, reaching up to pull her crumpled trilby from her hair. He caught her chin with one finger, angled her face more fully into the feeble light.

Essa flinched, but she didn’t pull away. “Train. Last freight to Ostwick leaves in about fifteen minutes.”

Her answer only created further questions. Cullen wisely kept them to himself. She caught her bottom lip between her teeth and he barely stopped a groan.

“There,” he began. The electricity in the quarter failed abruptly, casting them into near total darkness.  Essa mumbled what he thought was a curse. “I think the bleeding has all but stopped.”

He moved slowly, carefully, fingers searching for hers.

“It won’t delay the train,” she said.

“I know.” Cullen finally caught one of her hands. Her glove was soft, thin leather warmed by the skin beneath it.

“Just keep a little pressure…” He lifted her hand to her cheek, placed it over the cloth. “”There. Shall we catch your train?”

She nodded. He felt the movement more than he saw it, realized they had drifted too close in the tight confines of the truck cab.

“Have you ever hopped a train, templar?”

“ _Former_ templar,” he corrected her, pulling back quickly and turning to open the door. He slid down to the pavement, took a fortifying breath of bad air and turned back to help her down from the cab.

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’.”  Essa dropped her hat onto his outstretched hand. “Shape that for me will you?”

He waited for her hop down, legs appearing steadier than his felt. She closed the door quietly behind her while Cullen tried to beat the trilby back into an approximation of its former lines.

“I hate this Maker-forsaken city,” she confessed, straightening the long fall of her coat with her free hand and staring toward the murky sky.

“Then why stay?” Cullen placed the hat on top of her head; he thought she might have smiled.

“Same reasons as any, I suppose.”

He waited for her to pick up the end of her sentence, but Essa only shrugged.

“What about you?”

“Misplaced loyalties,” he replied with easy succinctness.

“That too.” Essa tucked her hand in the crook of his arm and began walking toward the train yard, handkerchief still pressed to her cheek.


	6. Act 1: Last Train Out of Kirkwall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the explosion at the docks, Essa and Cullen flee Kirkwall. Now with some serious content additions. 
> 
> This is the final piece in Act 1 (which is now complete!)

 

 

The train was an eastbound freight out of Nevarra. It barely slowed down through the trainyard, wheels moaning a lonesome tune as the engineer waved them up into the cab. Essa greeted the engineer as if they were old war buddies, a wide smile and soft eyes that spoke of shared ghosts. The woman—Seanna Something, Cullen didn’t quite catch—had a Fereldan accent and dark calculating stare that she dragged with open suspicion up Cullen’s body. She wouldn’t let Essa pay her for the added trouble of him; their haggling exchange sounded like a familiar song above the roar of the fire box. He wondered how Essa knew the woman, why she trusted her with their flight from a city  that was even then erupting into fire and noise.

“It’ll be a little cramped,” Essa shouted, herding him across the cab and directing him to a spot close to the window, as much beyond Seanna’s path between the firebox and the tender as the narrow space would allow. “But it’s not far.”

He didn’t ask where they were going, and even if he had wanted to, it would have been impossible to carry on a private conversation over the noise of the engine. Cullen stood silently in the shadowed compartment, mind still traveling in jagged lines between the major events of the night. Essa seemed unconcerned with the fact that most of Kirkwall’s warehouse district was currently ablaze or that her employer was possibly dead in an explosion at the docks. She fell easily into what looked to be a common enough routine, helping Seanna with a few quick tasks, calling out gauge readings as the engine’s thunder began to rise. Essa was obviously content with following orders, but she was as comfortable in the driver’s compartment as she was in  _the Tourney._ She was certainly of a surer foot than he was. The train’s wheels surged forward against the tracks and Cullen caught himself against the steel wall of the cab more than once, the smooth soles of his shoes sliding beneath him until the train found a smoother rhythm.

“This isn’t your first time on a train is it?” Essa was close suddenly, and she leaned in still closer, chin tipped up to direct her words toward his ear.  

Cullen shook his head. “But I’ve never ridden in the cab.” 

“Then you’ve never really ridden.” She almost smiled as she reached over his head for a thick hanging strap. “Here. Hang on.”

Cullen caught the leather loop and clung, fingers grazing hers as he stared down into her face. There were shadows beneath her eyes, smudges of lipstick just at the corner of her mouth. It had been a long night and her mask was slipping. He knew his must be too.

“Not much farther,” she murmured, breath tickling his jaw. He must’ve wavered, he thought, given her some reason to worry.

“I’m fine.”

Essa shook her head once, not giving him an argument, but not letting him get away with the lie either. She moved more firmly between him and the rest of the cab and stood fast, stance as loose-boned as a sailor’s. Her body swayed lightly with every lurch and shudder of the train, a breath from pressing against him. It was the longest, shortest train ride Cullen had ever endured.

Half an hour later, they slid to a quiet coast in front of a small, forlorn depot. The clapboard structure gleamed darkly in the moonlight and couldn’t have been much larger than Cullen’s studio. There were no lights to suggest it anything but long abandoned. Seanna called a cheerful goodnight as Essa hung from the handrail, timing her dangling feet for a landing she seemed to expect Cullen to duplicate. He thought he heard the engineer laugh as Essa dropped easily to the ground. Cullen hurried, much more clumsily, after her.

“You’re mad,” he nearly shouted as his stumbling feet finally caught, slowing his momentum to something steady beneath him. He spun back toward her, determined to finally have answers now that they were—surely—alone.

Essa stood with her hat in one hand, face lifted to the moon. The stars were a scattering of fine diamond dust across the midnight sky. Cullen hadn’t seen a sky so clear since he found himself in Kirkwall.

“I’m not.” She took a slow, deep breath, let it out in a huff. “Come on, templar. We’re almost there. We could both use some whisky.”

She sniffed her coat. “And a shower.”

She turned south, toward the coast. Now that the train was out of earshot, Cullen could hear the roar of the ocean, smell brine instead of coal and ash.

“How do I know–?”

She stopped him before he could insult her with conjecture he didn’t believe.

“If I wanted you dead,” Essa told him, running one hand through her hair. “I would have left you at the docks. Now come on, unless you want to sit here and wait for Dennet to open the depot. There’ll be a train back to Kirkwall in about five hours.”

The waning moon was but a sliver in the sky, and Essa was more grateful than usual that she could see nothing of Kirkwall burning in the distance. There were no street lights out here, and they were far enough from the city that the light pollution hung, a distance memory, just below the horizon. The mountains crowded in from the north, throwing the tracks into heavy, slow moving shadows. To the south stretched the velvet press of the sky over the ocean. Seaside was an abandoned vacation spot, left to rot after the last Blight. The packed dirt road that led from the depot to the waterfront had long grown over with sea grass and wild oats.

“Mind the sand,” she warned Cullen, pausing to slip out of her heels.

He followed her in silence, his unasked questions a weight of frustration and distrust at her back. They would keep, she told herself, and the short hike to her cottage would give her time to decide the best way to answer most of them. They were both tired and worried and she would have been frightened if she had a lick of sense to her name, so he probably was.

She took a short trail through the high white dunes, breathing a sigh when Seaside appeared. The empty storefronts yawned with wide, aching windows, paint faded in a muted rainbow, washed near to bare boards in places. There were exactly seventeen buildings and three of them were sound enough for occupation. Only one of them was inhabited.  

“What the–?” Cullen’s surprise was stolen by tumbling surf.

Essa laughed. “You were expecting some crumbling beach house?” she called over the wind. “Or did you fancy a ship? I suppose we could sail away to Ferelden, but that seems a little rash.”

She didn’t turn back for his response, only a quick glance to make certain he followed her down the rotting boardwalk and along the discordant coastline. A wide trail took them up onto the long line of stark grey cliffs that ran from Seaside and nearly to Ostwick. The headland opened up, a wash of deeper greys beneath the blue black sky. Midway Lighthouse stood beyond a bank of fog, an unseen sentry on its narrow finger of rock that jutted out into the Waking Sea.

Cullen shook his head. “When you go to ground,” he muttered. “You really go to ground.”

“Never been one for doing things halfway,” Essa said and tried not to hear her own words as portent.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This concludes Act I! The final three pieces in this work are previously written bits that need a home until Act V gets underway (which will hopefully be this week! :) )


End file.
